Planting Churches among the City's Poor - Volume 1

P ART III: P LANTING U RBAN C HURCHES • 399

Selecting a Target Area Bryan Cullison

I had the luxury of a clean slate and no expectations when I began the process of picking an area to start in. I had no team members and no idea where to start. I knew only that we were to go into an area where we had done no previous ministry, both for the sake of branching out as a ministry where we had done 90% of our work within about a one- square-mile radius, and also as a bold statement that testified to our staff the seriousness of our vision to plant churches across Los Angeles County wherever the urban poor were. I was frustrated and convicted that we as a ministry talked about the abundance of people groups in Los Angeles and how the world had come to our doorstep, yet we were only in reality ministering to a fraction of these people groups, rendering those statistics interesting at best and misleading at worst. At the Timothy Conference in July of 2002, I met a young woman on staff in Wichita named Stacy Waddle who had lived and ministered in the Hollywood area. Stacy was a wealth of information on the ins and outs of that community, its flavor, essence, spiritual climate, needs, history, direction, people groups, demographics, and physical structures. More importantly, she displayed an infectious burden for the city of Hollywood, one that my heart was already feeling previous to meeting her. She painted quite an attractive picture for me, citing the diversity of the area, the plentiful and rich opportunities to develop relationships through the means of basketball (my best and favorite sport) with the young men, and the obvious favor towards media (my other passion) that would be particularly relevant and useful in reaching non-Christians there. I returned to Los Angeles after the conference with an excitement to learn as much as I could about the Hollywood community, prematurely committing my heart to this area without going through the necessary steps of seeking God’s heart or doing the legwork or academic research to validate the choice. Through wise leadership, I was compelled to pull back a bit and go through some more formal decision-making in committing to an area where the ministry as a whole would be investing for such a long time in the future. I am thankful for that. So, at this point I had identified Hollywood as one possibility. I was also given the suggestion of an area just northeast of the LA Office which was particularly dense and close to our ministry center which could capitalize on the resources already available and established here. A major street running through the middle of this second area was Westmoreland Avenue, so this area was dubbed Westmoreland for reference purposes.